Ok, first up, another Edith Nesbit post up at Tor.com, this one about The House of Arden.
NOT a favorite of mine, but Gore Vidal liked it. Which, er. Yes. Onwards!
Meanwhile, just to confirm that every once in awhile I do poke my little head out to read something other than speculative fiction, children's fiction, and gossipy biographies about long dead people, a couple of recent non-genre reads I can strongly recommend:The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean
, by journalist Susan Casey, is mostly the story of various extreme surfers who hop all over the world to chase down and ride giant waves all around the world, and by giant, I mean 70 feet/21 meters to 30 meters. These are the sorts of waves that destroy tanker ships.
Not surprisingly, surfing on these sorts of waves, even with highly specialized surfboards and people riding around on jet skies to pull surfers out of the water while helicopters hover above is, how shall we say this, risky
. Even the author, no surfer, gets badly tossed around just trying to document this kind of thing from a boat. It's riveting stuff.
Slightly less riveting are the chapters that punctuate the surfing bit, where Casey, no scientist, follows wave scientists around and tries to understand both waves and global warming. This is not entirely successful, mostly because – as I learned to my great distress in a graduate-level physical oceanography class, waves caused by wind are COMPLICATED, and by complicated, I mean, they will drive you to literal tears when you are trying desperately to understand what your professor is talking about and how any of these damn equations work and why all of them seem to involve calculus and worse having to program calculus into a computer. Er. I digress. The second problem is that despite several PhDs patiently trying to tell her otherwise, Casey remains unable to understand that tsunami waves (caused by earthquakes) and other waves (caused by, in my opinion, far too many damn things) are not the same thing
. (I actually got all of the questions about tsunami waves correct.) Which in turn means that although global warming is expected to impact the way wind wave works, and may, or may not, impact the damage
caused by tsunami waves (this is debatable) and may possibly increase the number of undersea earthquakes causing tsunamis (this is VERY debatable and only in the "worth investigating" stage) it will not affect the way tsunami waves work.
This may not seem that important, but when a good half of your book is about the growing potential for wave damage from global warming, it's important to make sure that you have a clear understanding of the differences between tsunami waves, wave waves, and storm surge waves. Casey doesn't, and she also isn't good at translating scientific terminology to layman's chatter, which means that her chapters about global warming, waves and scientists are decidedly the weaker part of the book.
Which in the end is ok; I guarantee everyone will really be reading this for the extreme surfer stories, and if readers get a bit of "wow, waves are complicated" lessons from this, it's all good.
The other strongly recommended book is The Instance of the Fingerpost
, by Iain Pears. Set in the reign of Charles II, this is a book about the murder of one Dr. Grove and the woman suspected of committing the crime, told from four different viewpoints – that of a charming Italian traveller, a young man obsessed with restoring his father's name and honor, a mathematical genius, and another young man who just loves books.
Naturally, all four of these narrators have something to hide – in some cases, quite a bit to hide – and their perspectives are quite, quite different.
Pears ladles his book with discussions of blood transfusions (this is pretty fascinating); a horrified and unintentionally hilarious description of a performance of King Lear
(part of the fun is trying to figure out which Shakespearean play that particular narrator is reacting to); and appearances by most of the great academics and thinkers of the period: John Locke, the great Robert Boyle, Christopher Wren, and so on, all happily discussing philosophy and blood transfusions in between murder investigations. This is all pretty great, but what makes the book is the way Pears handles the four competing viewpoints of the murder and its events – and the way all four men, and it's very important that these are men, justify their various actions, which include unauthorized and questionable medical experiments and autopsies, attempts to purchase corpses, rapes, spying, betrayals, purchases of books and musical instruments that come close to bankrupting them, homosexual desires, and so on. (The rape section of the novel, while not graphic, may be triggery for some readers given that narrator's ability to justify the rape to himself – while making it perfectly clear to readers that this is rape, it is unacceptable, and that it most definitely harmed the woman involved.)
That most of the characters and two of the narrators are historical figures adds to the intrigue and the mystery (without being too spoilery I was fairly sure that John Locke wouldn't end up as the murderer, but then again, his role in the narration ended up surprising me).
Warning: this is a heavy book, and it's meant for rereading. Some of you will find the rape section and the sections narrated by the mathematician John Wallis (a historical figure) to be difficult going. But this was most definitely my kind of book.